Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#121

Post by Fins » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #95

adventured wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf... Tesla in fact ranks with Acura on quality, above Volvo, and just below Volkswagen and Ford. The low rating on Mercedes should be pretty embarrassing for them, they're merely one quality notch above Tesla and comparable to Ford.

Those rankings are pretty fishy. Acura is just a rebadged Honda and they rate completely different. Also Kia and Hyundai rate higher than Mercedes, Porsche and Volkswagen, which is completely against my experience with those brands. FWIW it has Tesla scoring near the bottom of the pack with 37 points out of a possible 100, with the lowest entrant scoring 26 points. Volvo is surprisingly low on that ranking, I know th…

So to put it another words, every large automotive conglomerate has multiple brands that are greatly more reliable than Tesla.

Not sure about Kia, but their parents at Hyundai definitely do have better build quality than Tesla. I would imagine that someone buying a new one would complain to the dealership if they tried to shove a car with body gaps as bad as Tesla's ton them... And on a Hyundai less than half the price of Model S you get stuff like cooled seats that Tesla doesn't even offer currently (luxury car, right!) and that didn't work worth crap when they did offer them...

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#122

Post by tim333 » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #97

jacquesm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading a book doesn't change fundamentals. Tesla is heading for a rough time, I sincerely hope they make it through and hope that Musk will not come to regret making that stupid joke.

How are they headed for hard times? I'm genuinely uneducated on the matter and want to know more.

Losing money. Almost out of cash. Model 3 numbers less that predicted. Bonds down. I'm just summarising the issues - they may well do fine.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16612805 for example.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#123

Post by dmode » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

saas_co_de wrote: post #116

ckastner wrote: post #5

> The Model 3 output increased exponentially, representing a fourfold increase over last quarter. This is the fastest growth of any automotive company in the modern era. If this rate of growth continues, it will exceed even that of Ford and the Model T. Way to spin all the production issues and delay of the previous quarter into a positive. They're way behind the goals they set for themselves, but instead of measurin…

It really reeks of desperation. They are frantically doing anything they can to keep investor confidence but all of their tricks are so worn out and tired now and their debt load and burn rate is so much higher that it isn't going to change anything. They will go bankrupt. 100%. Maybe they can arrange some buy out or merger to try and save face, but doubtful. Given their level of candor I am sure their accounting is…

I have been hearing this bankruptcy coming for the last 7 years. Yet, Tesla keeps delivering. I remember when the Model X production started, people had already written the obituary because of quality issues. The key thing to note is that Tesla's demand far outstrips supply and Tesla's customer satisfaction rate is over 90%. They can raise any amount of liquidity with those numbers.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#124

Post by Fins » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

dmode wrote: post #109

Fins wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling Model 3 a luxury vehicle is rather a stretch. Even Model S lacks things Hyundai one third the price has. While no other company can come close to Tesla in selling half-baked (or altogether nonexistent) stuff to the gullible, packaging Panasonic batteries in an overpriced golf cart isn't something that any company that knows how to actually build cars would be particularly concerned about.

Lol, I have a Hyundai and a Model S. What you wrote makes zero sense

So... your model S has cooled seats? Tesla doesn't offer them now (and apparently they didn't work when they did). My wife's Sonata has them, and they work.

Not even talking about stuff that is to be expected in a $70K+ car, Tesla doesn't quite compete with a $30K econobrand when it comes to creature comforts.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#125

Post by buvanshak » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #38

buvanshak wrote: post #30

Why is this posted on HN? I know there are a lot of people here who are so into Tesla. But this does not fit the HN content guidelines in anyway...

Which content guidelines are you talking about? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

How is quarterly statement from a Car company interesting to "good hackers" or how is this gratifying intellectual curiosity in anyway? If you want to discuss the financial/production reports of the company you can go to the forums dedicated to it...

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#126

Post by InitialLastName » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #89

InitialLastName wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk is a genius, Apparently, Musk is a good salesman, especially of himself.

Come on, he can be a salesman and a genius. At least he is a very extreme determined and hard working person, if not an actual "genius" (whose brains are wired differently). People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company.

> People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company

... except for the other successful entrepreneurs who made mid-career changes to fund private rocket launch companies:

- Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin)

- Robert Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace)

- Jim Benson (SpaceDev)

- Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)

I'll grant that Musk appears to be a successful businessman, and an effective leader, but his real strength appears to be selling his ideas so hard that even his most Boring (tm) projects get covered in giant piles of hype.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#127

Post by JumpCrisscross » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

ekrebs wrote: post #8

2,020 is under Elon's 2,500 prediction, but well above the 1,000-1,500 expectations of those shorting the stock (unless the shorts' articles were deliberately misleading, of course). Also, according to the release, those are customer-delivered numbers. Overall, a good trajectory and a sign of long-term health.

2,020 is about halfway between 1,500 and 2,500. It’s almost like both sides are selling hyperbole around a truth in the middle.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#128

Post by ubernostrum » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #89

InitialLastName wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk is a genius, Apparently, Musk is a good salesman, especially of himself.

Come on, he can be a salesman and a genius. At least he is a very extreme determined and hard working person, if not an actual "genius" (whose brains are wired differently). People don't generally make a mid career change into rocket science and then have the most successful private rocket launch company.

Musk's standard operating procedure is to

1. Find a market where most or all of the fundamental R&D has already been done and paid for by someone else, and is publicly available to use

2. Enter that market, evolve/iterate the state of the art a bit

3. Promise immense economies of scale, and slather everything with glittery marketing and PR stunts

This is what SpaceX is doing. This is what Tesla is doing. It is not a sign of "genius", and in both cases the promises Musk is making are... ambitious.

There have been multiple attempts to bring down the cost of launching stuff into space, and with the smartest people in the world working on the problem we've seen only modest gains. Musk barged into the market and promised at least an order-of-magnitude reduction. So far that has not, to my knowledge, materialized, and I know of nothing in the pipeline which would magically cause it to do so (and economies of scale with things as expensive as space launches are uncharted waters).

And with Tesla, Musk seems to have overpromised on production. But, amusingly, building a factory that cranks out cars -- even slightly-exotic cars! -- is kind of a well-understood problem. I strongly suspect the thing holding Tesla back is Musk's Silicon Valley "not invented here" mindset leading him to disdain the accumulated knowledge of the existing industry. Which is not a "genius" move, by the way.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#129

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #49

agumonkey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what made these numbers. Late night burn or proper automation ?

They won't reach proper automation until they're getting 5,000 to 8,000 Model 3s per week. But, of course, nobody really does automation to the level that Tesla is trying to do, so their current mix between labor and automation (as they continue to build up their automation line) is approximately what other car makers do. Getting full automation to work is really hard, takes a lot of labor and time. I think they'll d…

I wonder how much Tesla lives on SpaceX atmospheric results...

Musk probably knows a thing or two about technical limits since that, although people say that SpaceX needs are more high grade craft than large scale throughput but he might believe that this is peanuts.

I wonder how many lines run in parallel. thousands of cars per week is a few minute per car. That's not much :)

Someone please slip a drone inside.

Re: Tesla Q1 2018 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

#130

Post by vasco » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #49

agumonkey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what made these numbers. Late night burn or proper automation ?

They won't reach proper automation until they're getting 5,000 to 8,000 Model 3s per week. But, of course, nobody really does automation to the level that Tesla is trying to do, so their current mix between labor and automation (as they continue to build up their automation line) is approximately what other car makers do. Getting full automation to work is really hard, takes a lot of labor and time. I think they'll d…

> nobody really does automation to the level that Tesla is trying to do

Have you ever looked at production line videos from Mercedes Benz on youtube? You'll see that what Tesla wants to do is actually already being done, only with dead-tree engines instead.